Nicola Chester

Nature Writer and Activist

chalk grassland flowers

  • Nature Notes

    The Walker of Walker’s Hill. On a Wedgewood-blue day, with the wonderfully floriferous Pewsey Downs still getting going after such a late, cold, spring, we began a long walk with a picnic against the warm, honey-coloured sarsens at the foot of Knap Hill and the Workaway Drove. High above the froth of hawthorn blossom and […]

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  • Nature Notes

    The Barley Bird and the Comet. Out on the Marlborough Downs, there was a song I’d strained to hear at home. It remained a possibility there, a trace echo in the white noise of grasshoppers or the tinnitus of distant meadow pipits; but here, this funny little key farmland bird was real and singing, and […]

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  • Nature Notes

    A Bed of Bedstraw. Ham Hill Nature Reserve is a tiny, caterpillar-shaped, remnant of chalk grassland on the edge of West Berkshire and Wiltshire. Its high spine rises above steep plunging banks and a Saxon holloway, running parallel with the road to Buttermere. Facing the sun, its slopes are full of wildflowers, insects and butterflies. […]

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  • Nature Notes

    Bedstraws and Bee Orchids. I am at my desk when a familiar, fresh and lovely scent – nostalgic almost – assails me. Petrichor! The smell of rain on dry, dusty ground, from the Greek petra for stone and ichor, the golden liquid that runs through the veins of the Immortals. The last, fat raindrops from […]

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  • Nature Notes

    Harvest, home. Patchy holiday weather, patchy harvest weather. The two go hand in hand of course – harvest and a holiday from school – a relic from when everyone was needed in the fields. We rush out to pull the washing in as the combine roars into the field as if it were on fire. […]

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  • Nature Notes

    I know a place where the wild thyme blows … Where you can find it, chalk grassland is at its most romantic and sensual now. The short, springy turf is a riot of richly fragrant colour, alive with its associated butterflies, bees, other insects and birds. The sward is necessarily low, chalk plants have adapted […]

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